History and Past Activities
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History and Past Activities |
Cornelis Disco
University of Twente
Dept. Philosophy of Science and Technology
TWRC D305
P.O. Box 217
7500 AE Enschede
tel. (+31) 53-4893905
fax (+31) 53-4894775
e-mail: c.disco@wmw.utwente.nl
Can (neo)-classical social theory accommodate technology and its development?
Anthony Giddens' structuration theory will be used as an exemplary foil.
Demonstrating that technologies and artifacts can be integrated into structuration theory requires showing that they can on the one hand be subsumed under key processes and concepts within that theory but at the same time retain their characteristic specificity - i.e. that technologies (artifacts, artifact-systems, technical knowledge and rules etc.) do not simply collapse into undifferentiated 'resources,' 'structures,' 'norms,' or 'rules.' In other words, technologies must correspond to particular 'markers' in the theoretical network but still retain the specific nature of being technologies, i.e. in general being 'configurations that work,' often but not always configurations with a significant material component.
Three approaches look feasible. First, artifacts can be seen as social actors, as loci of agency. Thinking about technologies as (co)actors in the context of structured settings will have to draw on concepts like 'script' and 'mutual positioning'.
Secondly, technologies might be a species of structural 'resource' , i.e. economic and political 'goods' that human agents deploy in (re-)structuring social systems as, for example, in systematically increasing their incomes or their power. Clearly, technologies are mobilized with such intentions (Noble, Headrick, even Latour). Lastly, technologies might be associated with long-term structuration processes in which social systems 'bite,' as Giddens says, into ever larger tracts of space and time. This involves large-scale technological systems - e.g. the road transport systems - which permeate social order and stabilize particular practices, lifestyles, norms, morality etc. in a sense which answers in all respects to the idea of 'institutionalization.' A point of discussion would be whether this is fundamental enough to add the concept of 'mechanism' to Giddens' current repertoire of 'rules' and 'resources'.
Sociology of Science and Technology NETwork - last update: April 2006